Chinatown, New York
Group Exhibition
Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes
Off ParadiseMitchell Charbonneau, Scott Covert, E.V. Day, David Deutsch, Ben Durham, Sylvia Fragoso, Robert Hawkins, Urs Lüthi, Chris Oh, Michael St-John, Anne Waldman “Et maintenant, réfléchissez, les miroirs.” Off Paradise is pleased to present Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes, an exhibition featuring works by eleven artists. Loosely inspired by French surrealist poet Jacques Rigaut’s posthumously-published “Le jour se lève, ça vous apprendra,” Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes explores internal weather, those moments before consciousness sets in, when a low tide of hallucinatory visions creates sonic rhythms, poetic arrangements, psychic re-arrangements. Jacques Rigaut (1898-1929) shot himself at the age of 30, as he had announced, using a ruler to be sure the bullet would pass through his heart. — Off Paradise is a gallery located on Walker Street founded by Natacha Polaert in the fall of 2019. The name evokes the old neighborhood of Five Points, at the center of which was a small, triangular park, full of hopes and grime, called Paradise Square. It also invokes Paradise Alley, the artists’ and poets’ colony on the then-godforsaken corner of Avenue A and East 11th Street that is referenced in Jack Kerouac’s novel The Subterraneans. Off Paradise is a fictional place, right off Paradise, adjacent to it, but not exactly it.